Kobie has a great time exploring high-tech ideas that have fallen flat, writing with expertise and humor.
A science journalist investigates flying cars and other extravagant technological promises that have failed to get off the ground.
It was sci-fi writer William Gibson who said that the future is already here; it’s just very unevenly distributed. Kobie, a contributing editor at Wired and the futures editor at PC Pro, would probably agree, as she romps through a series of gee-whiz ideas for machines that have failed to fulfill their much-hyped promise. The author examines AI, robots, hyperloop transport, brain-computer interfaces, and smart cities, among other concepts, with her eyes open and tongue in her cheek. She chronicles her attendance at trade shows featuring slightly creepy robots and interviews with optimistic inventors, and she tracks through the relevant history, noting that the first regulatory approval for a flying car in the U.S. was in 1956. She even rode in a driverless car, after which she concluded that there is not much need for one. Some of these ideas sounded good on paper or in the lab but ran aground due to persistent technical problems, such as power requirements. For others, there is simply not enough demand for large-scale production. AI systems are progressing, but they remain a long way from the predicted models. Corporations and governments have invested billions into these projects, and there seems to be no end to the stream of venture capital. Kobie is not against scientific inquiry for its own sake, but she believes that the money and brainpower involved could be more effectively used to provide practical solutions for daily problems. “We don’t need smart cities,” she writes. “We need good ones. Liveable ones. We need sustainable ones.” It is an important idea, rounding out an enjoyable, interesting book.
Kobie has a great time exploring high-tech ideas that have fallen flat, writing with expertise and humor.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781399403108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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